Anna Christie Summary

Old Chris Christopherson looks upon the sea as the symbol of a malignant fate. True, he is now skipper of the coal barge Simeon Winthrop, but in his younger days he was an able seaman and boatswain on the old windjammers and visited every port in the world. As far back as he knew, the men of his family in Sweden followed the sea. His father died aboard ship in the Indian Ocean, and two of his brothers drowned. The curse of the sea is not confined to the men in the family. After the news of her husband’s and her sons’ deaths, Chris’s mother died of a broken heart. Unable to bear the loneliness of being a sailor’s wife, his own wife brought their young daughter, Anna, to America to live with some cousins on a farm in Minnesota. Anna’s mother died, and the girl is being brought up by her relatives.

Chris did not see his daughter for almost twenty years. One day while he is having a drink at Johnny the Priest’s saloon near South Street in New York City, he receives a postcard from St. Louis telling him that Anna is on her way to New York. This news throws Chris into something of a panic, for living on the barge with him is a middle-aged prostitute named Marthy. Chris decides to get rid of the woman. Being a kind-hearted soul and genuinely fond of Marthy, he dislikes the idea of turning her out, but Marthy says that Chris always treated her decently, and she will move on to someone else. When Marthy catches a glimpse of Chris’s daughter, she is shocked. Anna is twenty years old and pretty in a buxom sort of way, but her painted face and cheap showy clothes are telltale evidence of what she is—a prostitute. Marthy wonders what Chris’s reaction is going to be.

In his eyes, however, Anna is the innocent child he always imagined her to be, and he is even hesitant about ordering wine to celebrate their reunion. Life on the barge is an entirely new experience for Anna. She comes to love the sea and to respond to its beauty with the same intensity with which her father responds to its malignance. With the soothing effect of her new environment, and the presence of her father’s gentleness and simplicity, Anna begins to lose some of her hardness and to build some faith in men.

One night, while the Simeon Winthrop is anchored in the outer harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Chris hears cries for help. He pulls aboard the barge four men who have been drifting for five days after the wreck of their ship. One of the men, an Irishman named Mat Burke, takes an immediate fancy to Anna, and even in his weakened...

(The entire section is 1050 words.)

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